The election later this month of a successor to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is only the opening act in a Liberal play that could determine the relative place of the party in 21st-century Canada.

And a happy ending is not guaranteed.

The Ontario leadership vote will be followed seven weeks later by the selection of a new Quebec Liberal leader. In mid-April the federal Liberals will choose a successor to Michael Ignatieff.

The Quebec-Ontario-Ottawa triangle is central to Liberal fortunes in Canada. More than half of all elected Liberals provincially and federally hail from the country’s two largest provinces.

Simultaneous campaigns for the leadership of the Liberal parties of Ontario, Quebec and Canada are unprecedented. So is the fact that, to varying degrees, all three are in trouble.

At this juncture, it is hard to determine which of the incoming leaders will be handed the most poisoned chalice.

McGuinty’s successor will inherit a third-term government serving a minority mandate at a time when Ontario is facing a fiscal wall. Whoever is sworn in as premier next month will operate within a budget straitjacket — with little room to manoeuvre and make a positive impression on voters.

There are not many good-news budgets in the making in Canada this winter.

At least the next Ontario Liberal leader will not have to work hard at managing expectations. By comparison, the Quebec counterpart who will be selected in mid-March will have his work cut out for him.

Jean Charest left his successor with 50 seats in a minority National Assembly — only four behind the winning Parti Québécois.

That high score could be a curse in disguise.

The Quebec Liberal party has done without introspection for a long time. This will be its first leadership vote in more than two decades. It is taking place amid the widespread perception that the party’s spell in opposition will be short-lived.

Absent from those rosy forecasts are the threatening clouds of an ongoing public inquiry into corruption in the construction industry and the fact that the party is facing increasingly solid competition for the non-sovereigntist vote from the Coalition Avenir Québec.

If one needs evidence that it is hard to cure a bad case of magical thinking, one needs look no further than the federal Liberals,

As the party selects its fourth leader since Jean Chrétien retired a decade ago, part of its establishment is still clinging to the notion that there is a shortcut to rebuilding a party that has been national in name only for more than a decade.

Having squandered two Conservative mandates waiting in vain for the voters who made Stephen Harper a victor to come back to their senses, Liberal strategists are now staking their party’s survival on the equally dubious notion that the Quebecers who supported the NDP will see the error of their ways in 2015 and re-embrace their party.

The Liberals have not won a majority of Quebec’s 75 seats in a general election since the early 1980s and they no longer have the resources to have any kind of a ground game outside Montreal and the Outaouais region.

For the first time in decades, the unity issue is not central to either the federal or the Quebec Liberal leadership campaign. But the flag of federalism has served the Liberals well in the past, frequently doing double duty as camouflage for a poorly stocked policy shelf. That shelf has yet to be replenished.

As a final note, some telling numbers: today across Canada, 436 MPs and MLAs serve under a Conservative banner (including the Saskatchewan Party and Alberta’s Wildrose party). At 247 and 246 each, the NDP and the Liberals are virtually tied for second place, but for how long?

The British Columbia Liberals are facing long re-election odds this spring; the party’s hold on power at Queen’s Park is tenuous; the future of the Liberal brand is more uncertain than ever in Quebec. In 2013, the Liberals will have to cling to the belief that the darkest hour is just before dawn.

Chantal Hebert is a news services columnist who writes on national affairs.